PondTalk with Blew Featuring Stefan Rust from Truflation

Blew and Stefan Rust sit down to discuss various topics about life.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
All righty, good morning, everyone.
I know we're we're all gathered here today for a very special
episode of pawn talk where it's very early.
I'm not I'm not used to waking up this early for pawn talk, but
we're here. We've done it.
Last time we were up this early was for a 12 hour stream that we
did, but it's very exciting day.It's very, it's been a very

(00:21):
exciting week. Yesterday we had the official
APU's coin account announced that we've established an
official and formal partnership with APU.
So Pontalk and APU have officially partnered.
And that's been a very exciting,really just moment for all of us
here at the Pontalk team. And I, I want to say thank you
again to LFG and Tim for just, Imean, truly supporting and, and,

(00:45):
and helping us build what Pontalk is today, which we
wouldn't, we just wouldn't be the same without them.
And then also as a community, it's all about the community.
At the end of the day, this, this is one of the only shows
that was truly willed into existence by its audience.
And in that, in that way, it's, it's very different than a lot
of shows and a lot of programs that are out there today.
We have a very special guest. I want to before we introduce

(01:07):
him, I want to say that later today at 5:00 PM, we'll be
having Ron's Ron from Ron's basement with the Unicorn fart
dust coin. That will be later today.
Should be very interesting episode.
It's at 5:00 PM. And then seeking we'll be doing
his segment tonight. Most likely.
I'm going to get a firm confirmation on this of what
time. But later tonight for his kind

(01:29):
of satirical episode or whateverit is that we're going to
officially be calling. And who knows?
There are many things I want to get into.
We'll get into some more things after this episode or at the end
of this episode. But what I love the most about
pawn talk, aside from everythingthat I've already talked about,
is we really get such a diverse cast of people into the to come

(01:50):
to the show. Some of them talk about crypto,
some of them don't. And really what it's about is,
is broadening the community and,and making crypto more
accessible to people and gettingto know the people that have
contributed to this industry into this space so much.
And so today is going to be kindof a mix of all of that.
And I'm very excited because this is someone who I think you,
I mean, I don't really think they even need an introduction,

(02:14):
but but the work that he's done on the different projects, it's
kind of unbelievable when you when you listen to it, I'm
really excited to get into it. And so I'd like to introduce
everybody to none other than Stephane Rust.
Stephane, how are you doing today?
Yeah, thank you. Doing great.
Happy, happy Saturday. And yeah, it was what, a week,
like you said, so excited to be here and Congrats on your

(02:36):
partnership with APU. So glad to hear that.
Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah, it's been, I mean, you know, I was D Ming.
I was D Ming someone the other day and I said to them, hey, you
know, just just checking in, just just checking up or
following up. And they kind of D Med, they
responded back in kind of a confused manner.

(02:57):
And I looked and I saw that it had only been like 2 days
between the last correspondence.And for whatever reason, it felt
to me like it's been 3 weeks. And so, you know, time just
moves differently. I feel like in this industry
it's quite something. And I think it's unique to the
crypto world, right? I mean it the the speed at which
a map, the and the the, the variety and the the the amount

(03:21):
of innovation taking place is just so mind boggling that
within a day, it's like a week for, you know, it's like what
would happen over a week for anybody else in a day is crypto.
That 7 to 1 ratio is pretty accurate.
Yeah, the seven to one. Oh yeah.
The week to what? Are there anything in like

(03:41):
specifically this week that has caught your attention that you
think most people it it will leave it this way?
There's one thing from the news this week that you think people
should know about that they might not.
What would it be? I think there's there's three
big things that I would take away from this week 1 was the AI
race right. We are in a World War race, you

(04:01):
know, for AI and and that's number one, that's the big take
away. Bitcoin is the solid asset for
everybody, right? It absorbed, you know, what was
it, 3,000,000 dumped into the market, you know, easily, right?
Any stock would have crashed anddumped.
And you know, Bitcoin seems to have absorbed it pretty well.

(04:24):
And and yeah, those are the two really big things that sort of
took away. Yeah, blew me away.
The third thing was just, I don't know, just I think
Ethereum, right? And the treasuries that are
really buying Ethereum like crazy.
And, you know, we've identified Bitcoin as the digital gold,
Ethereum as the digital oil and then Solana as the digital

(04:45):
NASDAQ, right? And so if that's the world that
we're playing in, we are poised to really do well in a
decentralized economy. Why do you think, why do you
think the institutional demand for Ethereum came so late?
Or maybe it didn't, But it feelsto me that there is such a big

(05:05):
delta between institutional acceptance of Bitcoin and
institutional embracing of, of Ethereum.
And I think that's still happening.
I don't even think that's done yet.
Why do you think that is? So twofold 1 is I think Bitcoin
people saw this as the safe haven.
It's digital gold and it startedreally early on and I think it

(05:26):
took the institutional world at least a year to get their head
around Bitcoin, right? And just then they began to
realize that actually you can't do anything on Bitcoin, right?
It's it's a safe payment. You can store your welfare, but
there's no defy protocols directon chain.
There's no yield bearing opportunities on chain.

(05:48):
There's no mean points. There's no cultural movement
that's taking place. Real financial innovation and
tokenization of assets is reallyhappening on the Etherium chain
and I don't think they've even got their head around yet to
what the power is of Solana and the velocity, the speed at which

(06:08):
you can execute transactions on a Solana chain.
They haven't even come around tothat.
I'd say the traditional finance world today is in the two
thousands 2001 stage of where wewere in D5 and crypto.
That's amazing. You know, we just got a comment
from Doctor Golden Cream the 3rdthat says that he noticed that

(06:29):
there's a 5 to 10 year lag from when CT or the crypto crypto
world finds things to when others adopt them.
I think it's probably accurate. It sounds like that's actually
even a more charitable view thanthan your than yours.
If putting in 2024 years, 25 years behind.
No, but I think that's right. I think that is right.
I, I think that they, they stilldon't really understand it.

(06:50):
And, and not only do I think they, they, I think that they're
beginning to understand it, but I also think that they want to
hate it. I think they want it to fail
because for them to understand it is to recognize the viability
of it and therefore the vulnerability of traditional

(07:10):
finance. Yeah, I mean, one of the change
we're bringing about change and Wall Street and traditional
finance hates change, right? I mean, look at that.
They're still sticking to their standard Bloomberg, Bloomberg
terminals that they acquired. And they're paying, you know,
thirty, $50,000 per terminal a year just to get access to

(07:31):
information when we have just slew of other sources of
information. And not to mention all the AI
models that we can use today #1.Then talking about all the
financial products. You know, I think we, we hear it
right when a lot of the fintech companies and even regulators
are coming out and saying the best, you know, the single

(07:52):
largest innovation in finance since, you know, in the last 100
years. And so I think that's a more
accurate opportunity and just goes to show how early on we are
in this market and especially when we look at derivatives
futures contracts, right? And prediction markets in our
view is just at it's infancy to bring on and talk about futures

(08:15):
Perks was another example of futures, right?
And so all of a sudden there's ahuge shift of quadrillions of
dollars going to move on chain and how do we embrace that?
How do we support that? How do we facilitate that and
what does that mean in terms of opportunities, growth, where is
it going to come from, etcetera?Absolutely.

(08:37):
This is, I'm very excited. I think this is going to be, I'm
very excited for the conversation we're about to
have. I want to, before we go into the
next question I want to ask you has to do with information and
access to information. But before we get into that, I
want to take kind of a step backand I, I want to learn a little
bit more about you. And so I've seen that, you know,
you, you speak multiple languages.
It looks like you've grown up kind of all over.

(08:59):
Where did you where did you growup?
I grew up in, I mean, I'm a global citizen.
I was born and raised in Hong Kong.
My parents met there. They married there.
They gave birth to me there. I went to my early days of
school there. And then I went to university in
Zurich, in Switzerland and was immediately sort of looking for

(09:23):
more adventure. And I felt that the Swiss market
wasn't as dynamic as I was hoping it to be.
And at the time, China was opening up, it just was fighting
to get into the WTO. It was really, you know, mouth
to tone sort of the notion of opening up, becoming, embracing
capitalism. And so I saw that as the Wild

(09:45):
West, the wild new frontier moved over to China.
We learned Mandarin in the meantime with that was the main
objective. But ultimately there was this
revolution called robots. And so I got heavily into the
mobile phone business, managed to build relationships, launched
a mobile network over there, which we then sold to China

(10:06):
Unicom together with three otherpartners.
And that was my first sort of wave into startup land.
And yeah, it was very similar tocrypto.
We were up against the monolithic incumbent China
Telecom, which was also the regulator at the same time.
So that really paved the way forlearning how to deal and having

(10:29):
seven days in one day in that sort of experience and enjoy Sun
Microsystems, helping them bringsoftware onto that mobile
device. As the network started to get
bigger and get more bandwidth and faster transmission speeds,
how do we get software and entertainment onto these devices

(10:50):
that were growing? So helped found and created the
Mobile Ecosystem Forum, which ispretty strong and going still
today. But yeah, it really grew an open
source virtual machine business on mobile phones to a $700
million industry using open source technologies.
Yeah. And then iPhone came out and

(11:12):
that changed. The game apps started going from
a 70 KB size limitation, which was set by the carriers to all
of a sudden being able to go to 200 megabytes and greater.
And so that allowed for a much better user experience and the
networks weren't in control. All of a sudden iPhone and Apple

(11:35):
opened up and broke a barrier that before nobody had managed
to breakthrough, which was getting a share in the data
revenue right and having participation in that.
And that was that just blew my mind and sort of allowed.
So this saw a huge opportunity. All of a sudden all the
relationships that I've been building and some with all these

(11:57):
handset manufacturers, how do weget them to adopt Java and or
build developers to compete against the iPhone, build app
stores, you know, get unique technologies available, help the
BlackBerry Messenger, get developers to build direct
applications inside chat applications.

(12:17):
Working with Qualcomm, we were working with Google.
So I set up a whole different business and launched Exxon,
which was really focused around developer agency working with
some of that. I think we had some 600,060
thousand qualified soft mobile software engineers working with
all the largest tech companies around the world.

(12:39):
And that's when I got into Bitcoin.
One of the developers wanted to get paid in Bitcoin.
This is 2012. Yeah.
And then just sort of that it took me down a rabbit hole where
I became CEO of bitcoin.com, scaled that on the mobile phone
with a real focus building out merchants as well as user

(13:01):
presence, 500,000 merchants, 20 million users that all could
spend their Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash as well as Ethereum on the
Bitcoin cash rails with and using crypto, which was that was
fun, Ryan until all of a sudden governments decided to shut
everything down because of COVIDand.

(13:22):
Yeah, introducing too. Well, I feel like, you know, I
can't believe that's like one person.
Like I, I can't believe you justdescribed just as one, one
person, your own, you know, experience.
That's insane. What what do you think drawing
sort of on the earlier experiences, what what do you

(13:42):
think positioned you or most prepared you to even take on
these challenges? I think the underdog, right?
So being the underdog, I love being the underdog.
I love the challenge of taking on blue ocean and creating new
markets and and by the way, I never did it on my own, right.
You can't do these kind of features on your own anymore.

(14:05):
I think you need partners. You need, you know, Co founders,
you need people that you can bounce these ideas off and and
you go through really hard timesand and and yeah, I think, you
know, just I have a knack for having suffering and tenacity
and persistence. Yeah, and I think that that's

(14:25):
really what got me going in this.
But yeah, unique traits. I think is is just really the
big learning is yeah, you know, you're always up against
somebody else and somebody else is always going to try and put
you down. How do you straddle that?
How do you and I found unique isnumber one in China.
I was dealing against this monolithic government as well as

(14:48):
in sensitive area mobile technology.
It was highly regulated. So how do I deal with that in
crypto? You know, in the mobile it's on,
it was really virtual machines. How do you deal with VMS, not
Evms, Etherium virtual machine, but the Java virtual machine on
mobile phones? And so how does that then
translate into a decentralized nature?
And what I loved about the decentralized nature was global,

(15:11):
that globality. Everybody around the world was
collaborating. You didn't have resources.
Where do you find the right talent pool to help build using
Solidity? What was Solidity?
It was so broken at the beginning, it was really
difficult to learn. How do you convince developers
that blockchain and crypto is the future?
And a lot of developers, again, equally like the finance world,

(15:33):
they didn't want to write and learn to Solidity.
What the hell should I do that? That's broken.
It's bad. It's it's, you know, it's
illegal. It's only like crooks go.
So you had that narrative that you needed to combat as well.
So it's really motivating teams,motivating people.
And that's something I, I, I thrive on.
You know, I love sort of collaborating, finding a vision,
getting people behind that vision and finding the best

(15:55):
talent all the time to sort of really help support that.
I have, so I have two things follow up on that.
The first one is I like that youdescribe it as suffering.
You know, what am I? I don't, I've probably said it
before on the stream, one of my favorite.
I took an entire class on patients.
It was one of these like elective, I was in the, the, the
honors college or whatever. And there was a, the, the, the

(16:18):
entire class was all about meditations on patients, reading
different philosophies on patients and what it means.
And my favorite definition by far.
And I read a lot of, lot of definitions, a lot of work, a
lot of literature on patients. My favorite was Saint Augustine
and Saint Augustine wrote that patience is a process of

(16:38):
suffering through which we arrive at the better.
And, and so I, I think about that a lot.
And, and, and when I thought about that, I understood why
when you're waiting for a doctor, you're called a patient
and these other things. And, and I know you mentioned, I
know that cycling is a part of you as well.
And I had Maraud on the show a week ago and he was talking
about how, how long distance running in the process of like

(17:01):
marathon, this marathon mentality of being able to
suffer through something. I think that's very not just
appropriate, but I think it's sospot on for what this is about.
It is, it is there is an elementof suffering.
It's hard. A lot of people don't really
understand that this is not easywork and it's, and it is tough,

(17:24):
but it's, it's can you endure, you know, how much can you
suffer knowing that it's a process through which you'll
arrive at the better. And so I, I love that you say
that and I want to ask you aboutthe number one, how much, how
much of that endurance, how you develop that endurance?
But number 2, when you get into the talent acquisition, what do

(17:47):
you look for in people? But let's let's start with the
the first one, with the the endurance and the suffering.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, like you, I mean, suffering to me is when
you come out the other side, thegratification of having gone
through that suffering. When you hit an accomplishment,
a project timeline, a deadline, you know, a, a client success,

(18:09):
whatever it is, is so much more gratifying because you went
through that hardship and it really pulled you together with
the team you're working on and around that.
You know, I mean, cycling is an individual sport, marathon
running is an individual sport. I was a really big swimmer from
a kid upwards. So I was always planning to get

(18:30):
up at 5:30 in the morning or 5:00 AM, be in the pool by 5:30,
train for 7:30, and then you start your day.
And so that's sort of I think was just inherent in me to
really just always push myself, which sort of leads to the
second point, which is when you're finding team members,
you're going to look for people that are constantly have a

(18:51):
desire to close a learning loop,get it into the market, You
know, come up with an idea, bring it to market, get the
feedback from the market, improve the idea, get it to
market, get an improvement feedback from the market,
improve the idea. So that circle loop, how do you
accelerate that? How do you find talent that want
to continuously improve, optimize, but also execute and

(19:15):
get to market? Because if you don't get to
market, nobody's going to buy. It's a great idea, but you're
not rewarded for idea. You're rewarded for bringing a
product to market. Sometimes, not always perfect.
Sometimes you don't know how it's going to go, but you know
you immediately know where you're at.
And the faster you get to marketfeedback, the better You know

(19:37):
how to deploy your energy and your suffering.
What's one thing that you something that most people
wouldn't think is a red flag in in a potential candidate for a
job, or something that you do think is a red flag?

(19:58):
Good question. I've, I've, I hate to say this,
but I mean, you know, I found that people coming from, you
know, sort of. Ivy Universities, they've got a
master's in something or something.
Rather, they have a sense of entitlement.
They have a sense of they they're not used to start up.

(20:19):
I think they struggle with understanding what startup
means. You have to roll up your sleeves
and actually do the work yourself versus hoping that you
can hire minions to to come in and boss people around without
actually doing the work. And I'd say the same also from
big large corporations. How do you blend what is needed
in an execution oriented fast learning cycle or enterprise to

(20:47):
a big institutional organization?
Right. I mean, they both have their
different traits, but that adaption adoption or I don't
know what the right word is to calibrate your skills from a big
institution into a start up is really challenging and finding
talent that can actually make that transition.

(21:09):
People get scared. They immediately get scared
because you're accountable, you're working in small teams,
you're high performance and if you don't deliver, you're
immediately letting the whole team down.
And some people get really scared about that and, and, and
on that fact. What's something that you see as
makes you very bullish on a particular candidate that that

(21:31):
again, that is subtle, somethingthat most people don't see.
Proactive. Just be proactive immediately.
Anticipate, get prepared, make steps in the right direction,
you know, take problems away from, you know, the business or
the project or that you want to get involved in.

(21:52):
But how can you see and identifya problem and then immediately
come back with a solution, having with a sort of view on
the thought process? Why is that resolution the best
resolution and your recommendation?
And then you're ready to run with it, right.
And so that to me is really thatproactivity and taking
initiative is, is definitely. Yeah, really big bright lights,

(22:16):
green lights. With that being said, what do
you think is where have you beenin, in this very lengthy sort of
career here? What moment do you think your
proactivity was the most beneficial?
What's what's a moment that you thought you you had, you had

(22:39):
been proactive in such a way and, and how it and it was very,
you know, beneficial. Good question.
I mean, obviously, you know, when you're, I'd say 11, I don't
know, you know, sort of one thing, when we launched
Trueflation, we got immediate gratification.

(23:02):
I mean, we immediately got momentum and that was really
gratifying, right? We, we launched and within six
months we had an MVP ready. We had a whole different
strategy that we were going, butthen all of a sudden we work
with Chain link and Balaji and they really gave us good
guidance and then we brought that to market really quickly.

(23:22):
So within a four month window welaunched the product and we
secured investment right away and within three to four months
we closed out a Brig around thatwas really gratifying and
helpful. The other element, though, on
the flip side was to the suffering point was after, you
know, FTX and Terra Luna and allof that blow up we went through

(23:49):
I, you know, our main investors,they pulled their money.
They never actually invested themoney we had, you know, we had
nobody was willing to invest andeverybody thought, why are you
doing inflation? You know, it's already for free.
I get it from the government. So, and you know, the amount of
no's you get and nobody understanding what you're doing
and nobody believing in the vision of where this could

(24:12):
possibly go and wanting to wait that time ultimately as well was
super challenging until you hit then another trigger and then
that then ultimately gets you going again.
But holding the team together during those, you know,
thousands of presentations that you're doing and you're
constantly getting a no is is really hard.

(24:34):
How do you keep the team motivated?
Because sometimes you call the team members into that and
they're also going to hear the no.
And you think that they hear no,they're going to worry that this
project's not going to survive. Then we'll move on to the next
project, right? And that.
How do you hold? They get demoralized, Yeah.
Exactly and. How do how do you how do you do

(24:55):
that? Oh, belief, I mean, you just got
to believe in it. You just.
That's the tenacity, that's the suffering.
That's the. I mean, it's really hard.
I mean, I yeah, I I, I, you know, you, you question
yourselves as well all the time,right?
It's like you're going to automatically question yourself.
But ultimately, if you see, and I think we had a really good

(25:16):
purpose, right? So the freedom of economic
speech, what is that? How can people get the right
kind of data to back themselves up to have economic speech and
give themselves that freedom? And people saw the power in
that. Not trusting governments
anymore, not trusting the institutions anymore.
How do we build something with the revenue model that people

(25:39):
can buy into and support and as in, you know, countering that
notion that we will not believe governments, we will not believe
institutions, and we need to find another source of truth.
And so that was really convincing that this is a
mission. The world needs this.
And every time you see, you know, Moreno in Argentina gets

(26:02):
sent to jail for fraudulently manipulating, you know, numbers,
you see IMF papers and leaks saying that this is how you have
to change the narrative central bankers around the world so that
you can print more money and so that you can stay in power,
right? And so that all then justifies
and sort of gives you another sense of revolutionary response

(26:25):
to the market. And that's why we're doing this.
We're not doing it necessarily just immediately for a quick,
you know, quick pop here or there.
We're in it to change the game and then having, you know,
research like, you know, everybody started adopting truth
lation, which was an amazing sort of set of gratification,

(26:46):
right? People working on the projects.
If you see Pompliano promoted, if you see Scaramucci talk about
it, you know, Kathy Wood, Ralph Powell, Julian Fiddle, Stano
Larsen, you know, all of these guys sort of using truth lation
as the source of truth. All of a sudden you just feel
gratified and and we're on to something.
What is it? You're still not sure yet.

(27:07):
We still have, but we know we have concept market fit.
We don't quite have 100% of product market fit, but we have
the concept. People love the concept.
So are we skilled enough as a community with the community
together actually go and create the right kind of products that

(27:28):
ultimately will change the financial system and that's what
we're working towards. Do you think that, you know,
when, when, when we started talking about being proactive, I
immediately thought of true affiliation because it seems to
me to be at a philosophical level all about being proactive.
And so I'm, I'm, I'm glad you agree with me because I was just

(27:49):
like, it's nice to know. But the, you said something
there that I thought was very interesting, which was the, when
we got into the dynamics of the team and holding people
together. And you mentioned belief, you
know, I don't know how much you know about meme coins or, or
Murad's thesis back at technical2049.

(28:10):
So much of it rides on belief inthe power of belief.
And I want to get into that too.But I before we do, I want to
ask you about when you're talking about holding teams
together and when you're talkingabout these projects, how do you
know when it's time to let go? That's, I mean, that's always a

(28:32):
really hard thing, right? You, you hate letting go.
It's with your baby. It's really hard to let go.
And, and you know, I mean, I, I,I had to learn the hard way.
You know, it's like one of my start-ups.
I, I held on, held on. I put my own money in more
money, more money, you know, sold by, you know, my apartment
put, put that money into the business.

(28:54):
I didn't want to let go. I felt we were too early on in
the evolution of what we were trying to do.
And then in the end, you just, you just run out of money.
But what I learned from that is if the market really doesn't
want it, you know, I think there's only.
And yeah, you, you just really try to believe it.

(29:18):
There's it, it's timing. I think, you know, if you have a
right vision and you don't, you're not on the spot with
timing, then you you got to wait.
You got to pull back and then wait for another time because
you could have done it 10 years ago or five years ago, but the
timing was wrong back then. The circumstances weren't right.
And so how, how do you realize that?

(29:38):
I mean, unfortunately, I just think it's the hard way, right?
I mean, you hear so many different stories.
Everybody's going to give you advice, but you need to take
that advice and make your own decision because everybody's an
awesome backseat driver. And my learning was work from
experienced entrepreneurs, talk to other entrepreneurs, see what

(29:58):
they're doing. And once you respect and
everybody in my experiences, if you ask them for advice, they'll
everybody will sort of give you their sense and their advice.
And even if even if you go to the top people, they'll arrange
for maybe they won't be able to meet you, but they'll get you
some meet somebody on their teamor something like that.

(30:20):
And then ultimately that gives you better validation.
And if you just, yeah, that's the only thing I would
recommend. And for you, you know,
undoubtedly we've talked about suffering, we've talked about
that, that, that endurance. What for you?
How many times have you reached breaking points or or how close

(30:41):
have you been to a breaking point and what got you out of
it? Yeah, I mean, you, you hit, you
hit breaking point so many times.
I mean, it's like, I'm sorry, I laugh now.
I can in hindsight. But you know, it's like, and
yeah, I think #1 it's the team that helps you out of it, right?

(31:03):
The team, if they can handle thebreaking point with you, it
automatically disperses the load, right?
It's not all on your shoulders. It then rubs off onto the team
members shoulders. So that's, that's one big
support. The other one is just man, I, I,
I don't give up. I, I, I, you know, I just I, I,
I fight till you know the bitterend, right?

(31:26):
Why is that bitter pride? And also because so many people
said no in the past. Fuck you.
I mean, it's really it's like you know, I'm going to prove you
wrong. You know, I didn't launch this
business. I'm not a rookie.
I've I've done multiple start-ups in my life.
I know and I can I can pull together teams.

(31:49):
If you don't want in it, I'm going to prove you wrong or
whatever it takes. I'm going to get it right and
there are all I need is 1 yes. I don't need and I know, you
know, well, that's all I need. I just need one yes, one yes.
It moves me to the next needle. Everybody, if you're in a big
institution, you need 100% of the yeses, right?

(32:11):
One no stops your business. So you can't afford one no how
long and just look at the time cycles you need to get to a yes,
one yes versus 100% of the yeses.
I mean, it's, it's just such a different ball game and in that
place I will go and hunt down whoever I can and meet as many
people as I possibly can to try and get to that one, yes.

(32:35):
Yeah, I, I love that. And I, I think that's absolutely
true. And, and I think that's probably
true for most people. I think it's it, it really,
there's an element of, there's a, there's an element of spite
in it, but, but there's also this, this, this outlook of I
don't care how many times I failif in the end I succeed.
You. Know.
But you also learn through the failings.

(32:56):
I mean, there's always learning that you make right.
And look, I mean, you know, you even even as kids, when we grow
up, right, we learn to crawl, towalk and we fall over every
time, I mean, sucking. You're going to be a marathon
runner, right? From zero to 1, right?
I mean, you've got to learn, you've got to optimize, you've
got to train, you've got to tweak, you've got to put the

(33:17):
hours in. And I think it's not, you know,
there's not always that, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook story where you just launch a problem, you're up
there that that's not the, you know, that's not the reference
point, right? I mean, it's, it's a showcase,
it's a use case, but it's definitely not the average.

(33:37):
Well, and I, I also think that alot of people don't realize that
there is a process of, there's ametamorphosis that you undergo
every single time that this happens.
And maybe I, you can speak to this a little bit too, where
I'll, I'll, for example, I'll use myself as an example.
I, I'm, I'm handling a, a case currently that I'm, I'm filing

(33:58):
and I just filed an appeal on, and, and I had to file two
different appeals on the same case.
It's a very bizarre posture, butif I'm, you might know, I'm,
I'm, I'm an attorney as well. That makes maybe a little more
sense on this. And, and so anyways, I, I was, I
was talking to the, the supervising attorney or the

(34:20):
managing attorney of the firm And I said to him, you know,
man, if if someone had told me in law school that this is like,
this is what I would do, or someone said, asked me to do
this in law school, my, my thirdyear, I would have just
withdrawn. And I think most people would
just withdraw from law school. And so you don't go, like you
just said, you don't, you don't wake up and start running
marathons. But it's not just about skill

(34:41):
and, and talent and capabilities.
There's also, I think a psychological resilience that
you build up a kind of immune system that you develop where
something that you can survive today.
If you, if you told yourself 30 years ago, 20 years ago, hey,
you're going to go through this and actually you're going to be
perfectly fine at the end of it,your younger self would go no

(35:02):
way. There's no way anyone could
survive that. What's your experience with
that? I mean, yeah.
I mean, in hindsight, yeah. Hindsight's always 2020, right?
I mean, it's not fair. But I think if you are young,
you've got nothing to lose, right?
You've, you know, just just justgo for it.

(35:22):
What have you got to lose? You know, it's like you only get
stronger. You're going to have learnings
that you'll never forget. You'll make contacts and and
friends and and and and and and enemies maybe in some cases as
well that you would never have made.
But those emotional rides, that roller coaster is so invaluable
to the future of your life, you know, and I just you, what have

(35:45):
you got to lose? You, you, you know, you're 20
years old, you've just come out of, you know, school, whatever,
and just try it. Try, you know, just give it a
try and join a team, start a team, whatever, you know, But
just really, I think you you've got to experience the suffering
at work as well and, and puttingin those outs, right?

(36:08):
I mean, just going 9 to 5, sure,you can do that too.
But don't expect, you know, a lot of spice in your life,
right? I mean, it'll be a bit more
bland. It'll be plain vanilla.
But, you know, at least you, you, I mean, those are different
two options. But I definitely feel, yeah,
just, yeah. I want to ask about, yeah, yes,

(36:30):
I want to ask you about bitcoin.com and I want to ask
you about Trueflation. But let's let's start first with
bitcoin.com. At what point, you know, you
mentioned that you were working on with developers and one of
them asked you to be paid in Bitcoin.
Was that your first sort of interaction with crypto and how
did that go? Yeah, it was my first
interaction with Bitcoin. Bitcoin.
Yeah, I hadn't heard about it before.

(36:53):
It was, yeah, it was about 2012.One of the developers, they were
in Latin America and they wantedto get paid in Bitcoin banking
fees, banking transferral times were all uptane and and they
didn't like the local currency either.
And so they wanted to accumulateBitcoin.
So I didn't know what it was. He sent me a link to the white

(37:14):
paper, so I didn't want to read it, but I looked, he sent me and
then, but I read, I did go through it.
It was pretty sophisticated. But I then saw that there was
the the Java wallet, Bitcoin J, it was called.
And so I installed that and it was the worst user experience

(37:39):
you could imagine. But it was, it was a wallet,
right? I had control of my own money
and I knew one of the developersfrom my days at Sun that had
worked on it. And so he pointed me to a eBay
merchant that would sell me Bitcoin.
I paid in PayPal, did the transfer and yeah, and then add

(38:00):
it in the wallet. And I was like, wow, pretty
cool. But you know, how do I use this?
You know, I wasn't in the dark web.
I didn't do any of that stuff. So I just went about my
business. I had, you know, we were helping
big clients sort of get developers.
And all of a sudden, nine monthslater, it came to paying that

(38:20):
developer in Guatemala. And so, OK, how do I transfer on
a Skype call? I sent the money.
He he walked me through, send itto this address.
I did it all. And it was just like, that was
wow, instant, no fees. And I can do this on a global
basis. And I had just come back from a
bank. I received a check, a physical

(38:43):
paper check sign from Bank of New York.
I needed to deposit it. It took a week to clear, cost me
$700.00. And so this is the way
everything I'm going to do now is really going to be geared
towards this. I wanted to learn as much as I
possibly could because I saw theutility, I saw the product
market fit and it would disrupt an industry, the payments

(39:05):
industry. And if you look at the payments
industry, it has seven to nine, if not 14 toll takers along a
transaction. That's insane.
The money loss and wastage across that.
No wonder you need to print moremoney and no wonder we have
inflation just because of all these toll takers.
Crypto could solve that instantaneously on a

(39:28):
peer-to-peer basis. And so how do I get into doing
more of that? So paid all the developers that
were working on that project. If you want a Bitcoin, I would
pay you in Bitcoin. All the staff we were paying in,
and then all their expenses werepaid in crypto and Bitcoin at
the time. And then Ethereum came along.
One of our developers was super geared up on Ethereum.

(39:49):
And yeah, and then sort of things evolved and yeah, I
really loved the developer, the EDM, and that's when I just got
more and more involved and became CEO of Bitcoin.
That, that's phenomenal. I, I think it's, it's good.
It's interesting to hear that you're, that you did it that
way, because I think so many people believe that it's, it's

(40:10):
impossible to do it that way. They they they your use case or
your experience with Bitcoin is precisely what I think most
people who are sort of, you know, I I don't want to like
you're Joe Schmo, for example. I think they sit there going
that will never happen. My company, you know, this will
never be adopted. My company will never pay me in

(40:32):
this. And, and I think so to hear that
this is exactly how you used it really cuts right against that
narrative. Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, yeah, I mean, I, I mean, yeah, there was
just a VVA VO3 going around, right?
Sort of around Bitcoin. You're not going to buy a house.
And that's the fucking, you know, not buy Bitcoin.

(40:54):
That house, that's where the asset, that's my retirement,
that's my generational wealth. I never saw it like that.
I really just saw it as a means to change the payment mechanism.
And in mobile, you know, we saw M PESA in Africa use air mints,
right? So they'd be using airtime as a

(41:14):
means to do cross-border financing.
And so through my mobile days, Ilearned a lot about remittances
and using airtime as a currency cross-border.
We looked at cross-border payments, we looked at mobile
phones, mobile numbers, SIM cards actually acting as the ID
of a user and things like that. And so I felt that all of a

(41:37):
sudden, as a blockchain could meld all of that together and
you no longer be dependent on a jurisdict on on some sort of
government that has a, you know,a pencil line, a black line on a
piece of paper that says, this is my area that I can govern.
And anybody living in this area has to live according to these
rules. All of a sudden, the area

(41:58):
transcended into a digital realm.
And all of a sudden, if you wantEtherium, the legal and policy
set on Etherium were defined by the Etherium community.
And and so ultimately Bitcoin the same and so on, not the
same, right? So also these things had their
own regulation, their own, you know, sort of governance models

(42:19):
and you could partake in that. And, and that to me was
brilliant. And they transcended all
borders. And it was partly everybody
working on those projects were across borders anyway.
They were all living in different countries.
And so that ultimately created another beautiful aspects, given
that I was born in Hong Kong, raised in, you know, went to

(42:40):
school in Switzerland, lived in China, lived in the US, and so
ultimately lived everywhere on the planet.
I just felt that that resonated so well.
You you've mentioned as well a it seems to me that you believe
in access to information. That seems to be quite a big
motivator for you. How how much of a factor was

(43:10):
access to information with regards to Trueflation
specifically? Huge, right?
I mean and. And tell us a little bit more
about what exactly Trueflation is.
So trueflation, we started off when we when COVID happened,
right, sort of COVID started government shut down a lot of

(43:32):
the economies, you know, sort ofand were saying, but I I mean, I
just felt we were so berated to just telling us, you know, don't
worry, inflation is it's only transitory.
Don't you know, we got you covered.
Don't think about it, don't talkabout it.
You know, don't you know we will.
We'll, we'll, we'll look after you.
And it's just like, hang on, youknow, we're all a lot smarter

(43:56):
than you think you give us credit for.
And so how do we actually, and then I looked under the hood,
how the hell are you calculatinginflation?
And what do you mean inflation? Transit, it's even tax.
We all don't like tax anyway. And so you're taxing us anyway.
And so I looked under the hood. They do it manually.
They change it, they go back to nine months and they change the

(44:18):
numbers. So it's not immutable.
And ultimately they only track acertain limited amount and they
only report it once a month. And Bing, you know, we can
improve on that at least 30X. So let's go.
And so together with three otherfounders, we launched
Truflation. And yeah, then we were off to

(44:41):
the races. And what we tried to do was just
do it in real time. That was our only task.
Take what the government's doingand do it real time.
So we had to do it every single day.
And so we found developers. We took a developer mindset to
it. We found AP is that actually
gave us more data sets than the government had in order to be

(45:01):
able to compete against them anddo it on a daily basis.
That was our MVP. And since then we've grown this
into 100 million data items thatwe track free price feeds for
every item that we have 100 plusdifferent sources that we
aggregate this data from. These are all real world event
data sets. What do I mean by events?

(45:23):
They are prices of eggs, bacon, housing, but they're also
includes interest rates, commodities.
Why? Because commodities and the
price of commodities tomorrow onfutures markets influences the
price of the raw material to your foods, for example, that
you use today. And so we got more into the

(45:45):
aggregating all of that stuff and bringing it to a blockchain.
So we have to then build a blockchain because we wanted to
make sure it was transparent, itwas immutable and it was
accessible to everybody. How do we do that?
And so that was the sort of notion, the mission and, and,
and sort of, yeah, that's what got inflation going.

(46:05):
So starting with one single metric, true inflation and true
inflation, that's what it standsfor.
And we got a lot of support fromthe community because everybody
felt the numbers reported by thegovernments were no longer
accurate. You cannot trust those numbers.
They are not a reflection of what I'm experienced, what I

(46:27):
experienced when I go to the grocery store, when I go to the
gas station. They are different numbers.
And so proofration was at least a reputable, transparent source
of truth. And today, four years in, I'd
say we have some Lindy, which ismaybe speaking to our benefit
and what are we going to do off the back of this?
We're launching other indexes, trying to monetize all the data

(46:49):
that we have to then really build out and become, you know,
really good at inflation and andeconomic data.
What do you think is the future of of true inflation?
So if you look today, there's $5.5 trillion worth of money
traded off the back of this one number called inflation in the

(47:13):
US That's product, you know, government loans, tips, I mean,
they're all sort of categorized as Treasury, inflation protected
securities, how and, and, and, and they're using the old stale
number you 100, you know, 100 years old.
And not only is that number a metric, those numbers are also
being used in the calculation ofGDP.

(47:36):
You're in the PCE in all these other classes, you're using old
numbers, so old numbers, bad numbers, and you're working to
build out and extrapolate off those bad numbers means that
whatever you calculate in the future is going to be bad.
But more importantly, if people are trading off the fact of
these bad numbers, how do we give them in an on chain world

(47:57):
products that they can trade on in the future?
How do we allow you to trade on inflation in and be able to
protect yourself and get the insights associated with all the
data that we've now aggregated? And so from an inflation
perspective, today I look at prediction markets.
What are prediction markets telling you?
They're telling you inside wherepeople believe as you know our

(48:20):
outcomes are going to go and arethey self fulfilling?
Are they predictive? We don't know yet.
It's too early to tell, but they're a bit of both, right?
And so, OK, how do we do the same with inflation?
What we do, we have all of this data all the way down to the
price of wheats that allows us to then tell what is the price
of bread? What is the price of food at

(48:41):
home and food away from home? What is the price of food as an
overall category, you know, in the CPI?
And then what does that mean forCPI?
So people are betting on the fact that wheat is going to go
up, which we see a huge commodities industry worldwide.
How can everybody participate inthat?

(49:02):
Today it's limited to a select few licensed brokers that have
worked together with prime brokers that work together with
market makers that work togetherwith enterprise.
Again, a whole stack of middle men to be able to bet on the
fact that wheat is going to go up.
How do I hedge myself against that?
How can I participate in wheat going up?

(49:25):
Because I know that there was a drought in in, in, you know, and
so ultimately drought results inless wheat being produced, means
prices are going to go up, meansprice of bread is going to go
up. And so it's etcetera, etcetera.
So you can then be able to participate in that.
And then what decisions do you make at that correlate against
that? If wheat goes up, will people

(49:46):
substitute that with rice? So I'm going to buy rice and
then you can start leveraging onchain capabilities to build
correlations associated with that.
So I can then I have, if this event happens and you can put
that all into smart contracts and enable people to
participate. If wheat goes up, buy rice
greater than 100%, buy rice, right and things like that.

(50:09):
And so that's really a huge futures market that we as it
moves on a chain, how do we build products for that over the
course of the next one to two years?
There's something that you probably have dealt with a lot.
And so if it's a duplicative question, forgive, forgive me,
but it's in the comments. And so I want to ask you tariffs

(50:33):
with with regards to to inflation.
And I know that that was the buzzword of of the century a few
months ago and probably still tosome extent put succinctly, how
do you think tariffs are impacting inflation?
None at all. Well, I, I mean, maybe

(50:54):
marginally, you know, and, and Imight differ with our data
scientists team, but I just don't, I think it's, it's such a
marginal impact on overall costsof goods.
I think that the bigger issue isthat a lot of the retailers
realized that they can no longerput price hikes and get

(51:16):
consumers to purchase those new at higher prices.
So they had to resort that. And what they did is push it
down the value chain. Ultimately where it sort of
became important was and all theimportant items.
So those were sort of mainly more sort of, you know, yeah,
sort of plastic items, toys, pens, you know, sort of things

(51:39):
like that. But if in the essential tariffs
never hit the essential part of the rare earth materials, the
aluminum, they only sort of werethreats to putting tariffs out
there, but they were always allowed because they're such an
important ingredient to the overall industry.
And so I just felt, and we've seen it hasn't had much of an

(52:00):
impact. It's changed the global economy
and, and changed the game, but Ithink ultimately my view was
very much just listen to the underlying tone that is relevant
in all of the negotiations. It was not about putting tariffs
out there and generating revenuefrom tariffs.
It was more about achieving parity, right?

(52:21):
We wanted parity in trade and relationships, right?
So if you could come to my market, I want to come to your
market and, and, and you know. Reciprocity and accent.
Reciprocity. That was the word, right?
And I think that was the goal toget achieved and you know.
Right. Yeah, interesting.

(52:42):
So, so you, so you would say even perhaps tariffs are a net
positive. Yeah, OK.
I definitely think so. And even if you look now, the
dollar's dropped a lot as well. So the dollar will, you know
that that declined. The dollar's a lot cheaper.
So ultimately the tariffs will make up for that.
OK. There's another question as well

(53:05):
about. Domestic supply and actually
domestic, domestic production will make up for that because
ultimately, yeah, that's that's really what's going to take
place. Sorry about that.
I was just trying to get this question back up here.
Do you think we have another question from from 5G, who's one

(53:27):
of the leaders of our of our coin here?
Do you think that you that the government will the US
government will create a CBDC oradopts USDT?
I think they will not adopt A currency.
They will adopt all stable coinsthat are going to be treasury
backed. They won't do a CBDC.

(53:52):
They don't need to do a CBDC. Why would you do it CBDC?
In fact, it's much better to actually issue.
What the Genius Act does is it allows any financial, it's any
institution to issue a stable coin of their own liking as long
as it's backed by Treasuries, treasury bills, and we're going

(54:13):
to see over time, it's not goingto be backed by Treasury bills.
They're going to be backed by 10year bonds, right?
So you're going to need to have a blend of collateral deposits,
obligations and, you know, sort of treasury bills in your
portfolio. Walmart, Apple, Amazon, JP

(54:34):
Morgan's already had got their own stable coin.
Soft Gen. has a stable coin. You have Bank of America
announced they're doing a stablecoin.
So we'll see lots of different stable coins and Tether will
have to. I think David Sachs has
mentioned it on a number of podcasts where he talks about
over the course of the next three years, tender will have to

(54:54):
onshore some of their activitiesin order to be able to continue
to operate in the US. But ultimately all of those
stable coins are going to be transparent on an explorer.
So we will be able to track wallet addresses with stable
coins with transactions and correlate that to with users,
especially if they're issued by traditional businesses that have

(55:18):
already done your KYC, know who you are.
They can then correlate who you are with that wallet address and
then follow all your transactions on chain, which
ultimately is way more transparent than what we're
experiencing in the traditional finance world today.
And if you did CBDC, you'd only create friction, you'd create

(55:39):
concerns, security concerns, youknow, the ability that our
government would then switch offyour money, give you no access,
would have time limits on your dollars.
So you, I heard that the other day that Europe is trying to do
something similar and China has a CBBC.
And what they're trying to do isthen limit the lifespan of that

(56:00):
dollar. So that dollar after a year or
five years or whatever the time span is, it's no longer valued.
So if you haven't spent it within that time frame, it's
gone. Wow, wow.
That's that's. Pretty scary, you know.
It is what about you know, and we have some more questions here
about chain link and whatnot. But before we get into chain

(56:21):
link, I want to know, you know, I hear that about stable Quinton
and I'm happy you brought it up because it's going to ask you
about the news about all these banks launching their own
stables. I, I wanted to hearing you talk
about it. I think to myself, I think a lot
of people value their privacy and it sounds like to me that
some of that goes away with this.

(56:42):
Is there going to be, do you think, room for innovation or a
supplementary or supplemental product to bring privacy back?
When you're already seeing innovations around ZK Zero
knowledge technologies that are really trying to bring privacy
back, yeah, we definitely need to focus on that.

(57:04):
I mean, the privacy coins have all been shut out and shunned to
the corner. We had an amazing amount of
innovation in privacy coins. You know, I think we will see
that whole notion come back again, right?
I mean, ultimately the more moves on chain, the more
transparent everything is great.But ultimately there are

(57:26):
certain, you know, transactions that you want kept confidential,
right? And yeah.
And so how, how do you manage that?
And we, we, we got some work to do there, OK.
And, and same with us, I mean, what we're, what we're trying to
do with Trueflation. If you run a node, you get

(57:47):
access to all the data. And so where's the value of that
data? Where's the value associated
with that, right? What, what can I do with that
and how do we monetize that? That's where attestation has to
come in. But also how do you as a data
provider, maybe maybe I am sort of keep some of that protected,

(58:11):
you know, certain elements you may not want to disclose and
then how do you do that? How do you manage that?
And that's a challenge that we're definitely working through
as an industry overall, right? So so if you run a node in in
true, explain, explain how does that work exactly?
If someone wants to participate with truth flation to run a,

(58:33):
what does it mean to run a node and how does one do that?
So right now the Truth Network is AI mean.
It's basically a decentralized database, right?
And so we used PostgreSQL as a programming language.
So any developer working with the Truth Network doesn't need
to learn a new programming language.
You can write directly to the troop network using our SQL

(58:56):
smart contracts. So you don't again, it's just
you can write functions, programs and calculations
straight to the troop network and you don't need.
And you have a consensus algorithm, the be a Byzantine
Fault tolerant consent called Roadrunner that actually
verifies that data across this decentralized network of

(59:17):
databases. And so you can become a century
node operator, which is then a higher grade versus a normal
node operator. In order to get access to the
data. You can just download an SDK and
become a node operator immediately from our GitHub
repo. And that gives you access to all

(59:38):
the calculations, all the primitive data sets that are
available on the Truth Network. And then you can start building
your own calculations, doing your own interpretations off the
back of data sets. If you want that data verified,
you want to know who's the source of this data, give me
attestation that at 3:00 PM today, the data set is going to

(01:00:01):
be at what number I want that attestation and I want that
verified from the Truth Network.You then pay for that.
And if you're building. A gentic trading engines, if
you're building, you know you'rebuilding a, a, a, a a stable
coin backed by two flation. You want that attestation at

(01:00:25):
once a day, once an hour. If you're a prediction market
and you're launching 6 indexes that you want predictions on,
you want at the time of execution and settlement of that
prediction. You want attestation from a
third party because it just gives you the validation that

(01:00:45):
this is an accurate number and your smart contracts can work
off that attestation and then execute accordingly.
That's very interesting. I, I've, I've so many thoughts
on that, but I need time to really develop them because I,
there's, there's a different, I say project.
It has nothing to do with cryptothat, that, that I'm working on

(01:01:07):
that. A friend of mine is working on
that. I think could, could, could
really it requires data. And so I didn't, I didn't, I
didn't consider for one second how something like true
inflation, forget the inflationary that that's also
very relevant, but the actual data itself.
There's perhaps also the the thecommodity.

(01:01:30):
I just think, Hun, we've, we've,we spent so much time acquiring
100 million data sets, verified,authenticated, you know, qualify
and put that on the blockchain. Now that that's available, what
can you do with that? How can you build on that?
And that's really where we have a certain amount of ideas, but

(01:01:53):
the community at large will haveway more ideas on what to do
with that and what to come up with and also request for
additional data sets or want to write their data sets to the
chain so that others can monetize off the back of that.
And that's really where we want to take this and and, and how we
want to scale. How does chain link figure into

(01:02:15):
all of this? So Chain Link's been an amazing
partner, right? We've been working with them
since inception. They've helped us largely.
We've helped them acquire a lot of the data sets and put that on
Chain Link with their network ofnode operators as well.
We work with chain Link in the sense that that data is

(01:02:35):
available and compliant with allthe standards for chain make.
So it's now automatically distributable through the chain
link network and the attestationgets distributed through the
chain link network. We've got a big announcement
coming out in the next couple ofweeks as well with chain link.
But yeah, so that's been really good and fruitful relationship

(01:02:58):
ever since we've started. That's awesome.
You, it's funny because you knowmeme coins.
Well, they're memes. You know, you, you are on pond
talk currently, so we can't losesight of the fact that we're
here. But how?
How did you first notice meme coins and what what was your

(01:03:18):
first impression and where do you stand currently on on the
subject? I mean, the first meme coin was
Dogecoin, right? I mean, sort of really the first
big meme coin, let's put it likethat.
And yeah, you know, who is Cameron Jackson?
Jackson can't remember his name,but there was one what you know,
he was a big founder of it. You know, they, they grew the

(01:03:38):
those coins. So that go.
And I'm what I, I mean, I just love the community element,
right? And it allows for the
development of something outsideof traditional finance to allow
a community to grow and flourishand believe in a common purpose,
right? And, and, and it's not, it

(01:03:59):
defies logic, right? There's no financial science
behind it. It's just we believe and we want
to create something and we trustthe mean coin to do trades
amongst each other and to be ultimately what was money
created for? Money was created to facilitate
and accelerate trade. It was an exchange of value for

(01:04:22):
goods and services. And so if that's the case, mean
coins suit that purpose. It allows me to quickly launch a
new currency. It allows me to immediately
trade it. OK, there's been learnings along
that journey, right, where we'vehad logs and cheeks and scans
and but that's in every new frontier.
You have that no matter where you go.

(01:04:44):
And ultimately the beauty about crypto is it calibrates and
fixes it really quickly because it's open source, it's large,
super large community that actually communicates
hyperextensively. And we don't wait three years
for big fat report to tell us what was in there and nobody
rereads the report. And three years down the road,

(01:05:06):
who cares anyway. But in essence, we calibrate
immediately, fix it right away and within X period of time,
which is next to nothing, you know, we've already fixed it and
we've sold that. And you can't do that same scam
again. You have to come up with another
one. And if you come up with another
one, we'll do the same. We'll step you down, we'll
figure it out that nobody else can do it.
And if you did it, you were smart enough to cheat the system

(01:05:27):
and OK, we learnt, but that thathas been covered off now.
Do you have, you know, belief, belief is such a, such an
important part of this and, and it does defy logic a little bit.
You know, I was before APU sort of came into my life, I was in
geopolitical spaces, You know, I, I come from politics, I come

(01:05:49):
from law. And here I am now in on this
show and, and man, I really lovethis community.
Are are you familiar with the APU community specifically or
just meme coins in general? No, just meme coins.
I don't know the APU community specifically, I'm not involved
in that, but I do. I do follow meme coins.
I love. I mean, we have, you know, yeah,

(01:06:12):
we have this narrative really sort of, you know, that we're
sort of really, you know, turn trends into trades.
How do we do that? Right.
And so I think meme coins is really taking narratives and
turning them into trades. And we tried to do that in index
dot fon where you can actually go and take all of the 60,000

(01:06:33):
data sets that they have verified and then be able to
create an index across any assetclass.
And that ultimately and that theinspiration is mean points.
So we see the movement in mean points and the desire to create,
you know, enable trading off theback of trends.
And if that's the case, we see the same in the traditional

(01:06:55):
world where you see indexes at the thematic indexes being an
$800 billion industry with assets under management.
So this if we can blend those two together and allow for the
creation of narrative LED indexes instantly low costs and
validate it right away, that's really what we want to do and

(01:07:19):
enable ultimately powered by theTruth Network.
Well that's interesting. I wonder what opportunities
there are for for meme points toto integrate and work with
trueflation. I wonder how how that if that's
what you were suggesting. So we, we, yeah, we have.
So I mean, ultimately a lot of the price feeds for meme points

(01:07:40):
are on Truth Network. So you can actually start
working with those. We've got the Murad meme point
index, which is on index dot fund.
So you can already predict is itgoing to go up or down and it's
based on his portfolio that he has.
So then APU is on his list. So then.
So then there is already. There should be APU should be on
there. I will, I will, I, I, I can't

(01:08:01):
verify that yet, but if I look in my note, I would be able to
log and then get it tested and and verified.
Yeah. But no, it should be in there.
If it's in his portfolio then itwill be.
Gotcha. It's yeah, it's the is the frog.
It is the frog of his list. I think it's 3rd or 4th on the
list. You mentioned something so

(01:08:23):
interesting and and one of the comments reminded me of we.
We recently had an interesting experience on this show where it
was in the same vein as reactingin real time to the scams and
whatnot. I had some people reach out to
me offering to bot my account and bought the projects that I'm

(01:08:43):
a part of. And I and I, I was So what
struck me as odd by that wasn't just that they were doing it,
but that they were. So it's like they were asking me
if I wanted to buy a bagel. You know, they were so cavalier
about the whole thing. And I, I said, I said to them,

(01:09:03):
yeah, who who else do you work with?
And they gave me the list of people they work with.
And so, and the, the, the, the people, the projects, rather
that there were the memes that they're working with.
And so, and so the other day I posted and I said, I have this
list. And if I continue to see
projects using these spam and fraud bots to simulate market

(01:09:26):
like trade activity, to simulatevolume, to simulate engagement,
I'm going to release the list. I'm I'm going to release the
names that are on there. And so that sparked a
conversation where I decided what what I want pon talk to do
is to it's a it's a play on the Kelley Blue Book.
And then the name of my name Blue is to release the blue book

(01:09:47):
spelled BLEW book. Where what I really want to do
is I want to work with with coins and projects to kind of
conduct a bit of it. Not an audit per SE, but a bit
of an audit and to, to, to not only make sure and help
consumers understand which memesare actually just a 1,000,000
wallets of a dollar in them, youknow, and which ones aren't, but

(01:10:10):
also to help the projects themselves because you can also
be boded by a third party. It might, you might have nothing
to do with it. And so, you know, I, I said that
there needs to be some standardsand guidelines of best practice
of if you, when you detect unusual activity, you disclose
it, you make a post buy or be warned like it.
We're, we're, we're, we've noticed this, we've reported it
to X, we've reported it to Eli, whoever it is.
And we're waiting for them to, to deploy countermeasures or to

(01:10:32):
do whatever they're doing. But really just being
transparent like you, you talkedabout earlier with their, with
the consumers, with their holders and with the community
and with one another to hopefully take away a lot of
this coin versus coin mentality that we've seen.
And so this is something that that I said that we're going to
do and that we're developing currently and that one of the

(01:10:54):
comments is saying that after wemade this announcement, the
market tanked, just not connected, but it's funny
nonetheless. So this is something we want to
do do do you think that there is, I guess what are your, what
are your initial thoughts or input or feedback on on an idea
like that? I mean, ultimately the community
needs to buy into it. And my view would be to have and

(01:11:17):
work with the community on setting something open source
where people can contribute to and add to it.
And then ultimately, if they're adding to it, they feel part
ownership in it and then we'll adopt it.
And so that's, that's sort of really my drive.
There's so many attempts to do verification, credit rating
agencies and, and I just find that in a world of crypto, the

(01:11:41):
community will decide what's right and what's wrong.
And if you want to create a consulting business around that,
that's good. So.
That's the best part. I don't want it to be a
business. I want it to be free, completely
for free. Which means more and more people
will adopt it, right? If it's free, if it's a
guideline and and we have said guideline, you need common
terminology, you need common practices, right?

(01:12:03):
And so as long as it's high level enough and it doesn't get
into the detail, you know, it's like this in step plan, you
know, then it's like, Oh no, no,it's just, it's here's the
concept here, the 10 steps that we think are guidelines and, and
yeah, and, and people will startadopting.
And that's simple. I get it.
That's common sense. Let's let's work with that.

(01:12:25):
There's yeah, I'm, I'm and yeah,I definitely, I someone also
said, oh, this took a consultingand I, no, I, I think I want to
do this as a, as sort of almost a philanthropic thing of here's
what, here's what I want our contribution to be to making
this a better space for everyone.
And I really believe in that. I really believe that each of us
have a responsibility to make crypto a better place, not only

(01:12:48):
because A, it's just the right thing to do, but B, because I
think it will get retail investors ready to enter this
space. The the better we can make this
space, the more I think all of us can actually win.
That's what motivates that. Awesome.
OK, I have. Before we get into some closing

(01:13:08):
thoughts, I want to ask you, arethere what's something that you
wish more people knew about you that they that they don't like
you don't really get to talk about?
Yeah. I mean, I think we're here to
stay. We're really trying to build,
you know, some infrastructure, but we're also really trying to

(01:13:30):
respond to the market requirements.
Yeah. And, you know, really join, join
the ride, help us make this a reality is, you know, and yeah,
that's that's we want to make something that's valuable and
allows, you know, yeah. For people to work with

(01:13:52):
believable data in these unbelievable times.
And if and if you had to leave the viewer with just one
thought, what would it be? Yeah, I mean it's it's it's
yeah, decentralization crypto, right, Yeah, really that's my

(01:14:13):
belief that that this will really game change the world and
you know, put the governance hasto move away from 1:00 central
geography. I think it's just how do we
allow innovators to build wherever they may be off the
back of of infrastructure that is created and maintained

(01:14:34):
everywhere, and the best innovators will thrive.
Terrific. Stefan, that wasn't one word,
but but that was well. It does have to be 1 word, just
a single, a, a single thought. If the, you know, if the, if you
wanted the viewer to walk with one thing, what would it be?
And, and I think that's a good one.
What is if if people want to keep up with you, Stefan, how
can they do that? So the real S Rust is my Twitter

(01:14:58):
handle. So there I speak a lot, share my
views, truthlation.com, truths dot network, there's a website
sign up follow and you do get alpha.
We do try to highlight opportunities and ways to
interpret our data sets so that you can actually find ways to

(01:15:20):
trade the different trends. Terrific, Stephane.
Thank you so, so much. This has really been a pleasure
and and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining
us. No, thank you, Bloom.
Thanks. Really enjoyed it.
And yeah, thank you. Good luck.
Thank you. All right, take care.
All right guys, that was Stephane Rust and what a, what a

(01:15:42):
really interesting conversation and he's given us so much to
think about. And I I'm going to go ahead and,
and close this out here for a little bit.
We will be back later today withfive PM Ron Ron's basement with
Unicorn car dust and and then also later tonight see you guys
are. Part.
Of you guys and I will see you guys later he's.

(01:16:08):
A blue. Frog shop in a red cardigan
work.